Adam Rayner, Acoustic Energy’s first production manager gives his account of the early years of Acoustic Energy…

The most fun part of any superhero story, from Batman to Superman, is always the beginning, or origins story. Here’s the tale of Jones The Speaker, Acoustic Energy’s birth and the Rock N’ Roll industry of the 1980’s…

Forty years ago, Phil Jones, my old boss from the days of rock and roll, ‘rescued me’ from a rehearsal studio I was working at and asked me to be his production manager for his new speaker company, Acoustic Energy. I was thrilled and leapt at the chance.

What follows is a story of our mutual destiny and the live music scene in the 1980s, culminating in a bizarre slice of the purest serendipity that birthed the very DNA of Acoustic Energy. The startlingly clear, crisp, almost impossibly detailed sound. I didn’t even know what ‘power compression’ was, but its absence in the sound of Acoustic Energy speakers, gave me goosebumps. The immediacy, the accuracy and that whole fabulous soundstage, hanging before you, quite dissociated from where you could see the loudspeaker enclosures. And it started with a broken fifteen inch speaker and the fact that you can NOT ever mix ‘just enough’ Araldite two-part epoxy resin glue…

Rock n’Roll and Going Insane on a Desert Island

Welsh in roots, Jones is a mad keen musician and has always adored everything about loudspeakers and making music. Especially his instrument, the bass guitar.

I was a student at the University of East Anglia, studying Environmental Sciences just before it got trendy. It also turned out that UEA was the only real venue in Norfolk for proper gigs for bands. Only four universities in the UK were on the same level and we would get bands for whom the very next date on their tour was the then Hammersmith Odeon. I do detest the whole beer branding and name changing. The Hammersmith venue was always an Odeon cinema first.

It was exciting and fun and we had the who’s who of 1980’s pop and rock. The Cure, Kajagoogoo, Duran Duran, Talk Talk, and legends like BB King, and Stevie Nicks. If they were touring the UK, they came to us.

The UEA ‘Ents Committee’ employed a bloke called Nick Rayns who booked the bands and ran the venue and they were allowed to lose seven thousand pounds a term, which was a lot of money back then. Dead lefty! The GoGo’s found out that their ticket was ‘socially priced’ at 50p for our ‘Lower Common Room’ venue and were livid. Their pay was based on door take, so they were going to get flap-all pay! The venue was really small versus the Hammersmith-sized P.A. speaker rigs they crammed in. Public Image Limited had a stage set made of mock-tile finished hardboard, to look like a public loo complete with some graffiti. I snuck in a marker pen and added to the ‘tiles’ with a quote from Fungus the Bogeyman. “Putrefaction is the end, of all that nature doth intend.” As John Lydon was busy shaking off the Johnny Rotten image at the time with his new band, he saw this and got so angry that I ran away and hid for a while. That was after I saw him come on stage, look at the tiny venue and literally shout at the crew, “I WANT SOME SERIOUS HEARING DAMAGE IN HERE TONIGHT!” It was bloody loud and he think he got his wish.

“ENTS” was such a cool thing to do yet bloody hard work. You were a ‘venue humper’. You went to the LCR early in the day to unload the huge flight cases from the trucks outside and helped with tear down after the gig. I became adept at microphone cable coiling and was good at humping, as I was covered in hamburger from the mad keen flipper-swimming at my SCUBA diving club. (And any bit of water I could get in.) I even got called ‘Mister Muscles’ by a lass who was a backing vocalist for Mari Wilson. She wanted to be lifted off the stage rather than walk around the still setting-up monitor desk. Her name was Michelle Collins. She’s been on TV a bit since.

I was so large-shouldered that rather than pushing boxes to and fro, I would work with the driver of the P.A. system truck. This meant lots of lifting. After the gig was over, and the cable coiling was done, the first things placed back into the truck would be the amp racks. This was back when the power amplifiers were not simply built into the speaker enclosures as they all are nowadays. Small but weighty boxes on wheels had to be lifted into stacks on the ‘dance-floor’ – or that trailer floor area directly above the articulation point, as it was the heaviest gear.

This added to the shoulder muscles.

After the Tears for Fears gig, where I had got on well with the tour manager, I somehow fixed it to go visit him in London for lunch, weeks later in the term break. I met him at his office in Islington and I now cannot recall much, apart from him being happy to help start off a kid’s career.

Mr. Tears for Fears gave me the most valuable piece of paper, ever. It was a list of truly good Public Address sound reinforcement companies, from pub to big venue grade, that he rated. As well as mighty greats like ENTEC, there was also a little one called dB Hire. The name gave the hint. For it turned out that this man knew his decibels.

I made calls and it transpired that dB Hire was on my side of London and could use some roadying help. I went to see the owner, Phil Jones, and got the gig! I could borrow my mum’s car, park near his flat and then join him in his Luton-boxed Transit van as we went off to pubs and clubs around London and Essex. The Bull & Gate Kentish Town only stopped gigs in 2013 and The Pink Toothbrush in Rayleigh never stopped and is now a legendary venue.

Because Phil Jones was mad as a ferret about bass, he had wanted to provide the biggest profundity on the P.A. market at his level. This was achieved by two colossal enclosures that were folded exponential horns. They each had a single Gauss brand fifteen inch heavy duty, long-excursion woofer in their guts. But what Phil had done was phenomenal. Struggling with the problem for a while, he literally dreamed the physical shape in his sleep. He awoke and exclaimed ‘Eureka!’ like an old greek philosopher. For Phil had worked out how to fold the horns, so the bass would be huge but that the boxes could still be fitted two-abreast in his Luton box van, allowing for the wheel housings. He just needed a gorilla to move them around.

That’d be me.

Equally as obsessive about clarity, Phil had also swiped some old dusty horns from under a stage at a cinema. Westrex, or Western Electric multi-cellular horns, made of complex folded steel sheet. Things of great beauty that dispersed the compression drivers’ sound with width and height. Two JBL bullet tweeters per box helped, too. Our P.A. sound was thus huge, clear and deep. And it worked. Word got around and we were especially loved by reggae acts.

These bass horns were huge and, it turned out, never destined for commercial success as a design, because they used so much woodwork. Later, I got work at the biggest company on the sheet that Tears For Fears man had given me, called TFA. The mild-mannered chap who hired me for warehouse P.A.-building and some UK gigs, was Bill Kelsey. He had designed a P.A. system for the Bob Dylan/Carlos Santana 1984 World Tour. I eventually asked Bill about the Jones deep bass bins and if he was impressed by them and he just dismissed them. Explaining that firstly, speaker drivers were cheaper than big woodwork enclosures, so you just use more speakers and that secondly the truck space was also the problem. Finally, he also said you don’t want much bass below 50Hz in the P.A. as it becomes really hard to control in big venues. I went back to work screwing woofers into enclosures for Bob.

After pushing around a lot of boxes for Phil, and especially putting these mid-high units on the top of the P.A. stack by sheer reach and muscle, I could state that if it was 120lbs weight or less and eight and half feet up or less, I could lift it up or get it down from there. On my own.

I would describe myself as a human forklift and it got me work. Funnily enough, in later years as a posh HiFi speaker reviewer, I am certain that I was initially sent the truly big speakers because doing a two-person unpack, safely on my own was not an issue. If I wrapped my bare arms around a loudspeaker and leaned my body weight back, it would tend to come with. Up and out of the polyurethane foam packing in the carton, no help needed.

Back at the pub gig scene, just for the hell of it, Jones’d assemble a beautifully balanced live mix feed sideways through the mixing desk, (often a bit different, tonally, to what the room wanted best in the P.A.) to allow me to record the gig by stereo line-in to my AIWA Carryin’ Compo. It was simply a thing to amuse himself as Phil was now saving for a house with a recording studio in the garden. He wanted to record and this was a professional minor challenge he enjoyed.

This Compo thing was barely portable. A mighty faux flight case comprising battery pack, cassette deck, radio and pre/power amp, paired with ported speakers all in the box. It was all separate components and I made pro grade RCA cables for it to replace of the stock ones it came with. I would let that band recording play on battery power when everything was unplugged as we put everything away. Many times, I was able to sell the band the best live recording they would ever get, mixed by an expert, for a fiver! That was a side-hustle killing when my pay was £15 a night.

Phil had gone through hell to get to the position of ‘playing the band’ as he was the front of house mixer that came with the P.A. he rented out. He got into trouble when pulled over by police in the small hours one time. The copper asked him about all the big public address loudspeaker boxes and were they his? How had he come by them? Apparently, saying, “I got them by being intelligent and hard working.” Is not a good way to placate a Metropolitan policeman at midnight.

Here’s how he got them: Before there was GPS, there was the DECCA Navigator system. It was for planes and shipping and by the Eighties it was affordable enough to be in a SCUBA dive boat.

We were out of sight of land. We had been sitting around in our rubber suits for an hour but the little display of two rows of red light-numbers in the binnacle, told our boat captain where we were. “RIGHT! It’s down there. Off ya get!” And off we plop. The visibility wasn’t too bad and there, as we descended, was the shallow shipwreck we were diving to see. It was like majicke to me.

And while I was SCUBA diving, Phil Jones had marooned himself on a desert island, on a massive salary, as keeper of a DECCA Navigator transmission station. The cost and need of this system, meant he was paid enough to buy a P.A. when he got off his island. DECCA’s crucial role meant that expenses cost was no object but they had silly rules. He could order any and as much food as he wanted, but dogs were not allowed, and he couldn’t order pet food. So Phil simply ordered Ye Olde Oak tinned ham by the crate for his scary dog. It was such a lonely and remote job, that driven half bonkers by the solitude, Phil would go out and make more roads on the island, driving the bulldozer that had simply been left behind when the transmitter station had been installed. It was cheaper to buy and abandon a bulldozer, than to remove it from the island.

So when a young copper asked him, a bit of PTSD kicked in and Phil gave him the snarky answer.

My audio education began, in that Luton Transit van. We had no radio in the van and the conversation would be about the band, the venue, how good the ‘get-in’ was, and of course P.A. and speaker stuff.

Phil would tell me the illustrious industrial history of his stolen multi-cells and how they were impossible to find now as a concept. About their glory days in a cinema and how they had been abandoned. I’m sure he gave them a better home than anyone else ever could have.

Acoustic Horsepower is a not-really scientific term but if you convert the SI units, one acoustic horsepower is about 746 watts. Phil mentioned that to me one day, finding it amusing. The expression ‘acoustic energy’ definitely entertained him.

And boy, did we ever have some energy! Those bass bins were mostly used as stage extensions, they were so big. We had a few backing vocalists set up atop them, only to squirm back to the stage as they got grunting. The inevitable vibrations up their leg bones were just too much.

True to his name, the dB Hire P.A. company owned a decibel meter that Phil liked to use and we measured one gig at a ridiculous 126dB. But the most absurd thing was the deep bass. Queen Elizabeth College was the venue. I recall my trousers literally flapping at the back of the hall, with 20Hz just peaking at the desk.

We did the Brixton Cricket Club AGM gig. The Hackney All Nations club, the Podium in New Covent Garden and were hired by Johnny Osbourne and the Instigators. It was kinda educational for a middle class white boy who thought he had it all down. I thought as I was with the sound system, I would be accepted. Most did, a few didn’t. But our bass was huge and they loved us for it.